Chinese cuisine has a tremendous range of flavors and styles. The basic cooking techniques include stir frying, stewing, deep frying, boiling, steaming, pan frying, roasting braise, and so on. The essence of cuisine is the mixture and heating of the ingredients, thus a variety of dishes can be made by changing the ingredients and heating intensity. However, up to now, cooking involves a lot of manual labor and relies very much on the cook's experiences and skills.
There exists some automated cooking machines, however, they normally cannot realize an automation process from feeding raw ingredients into the wok till pouring the cooked food out of the wok. More particularly, existing automated cooking machines cannot automatically put the raw ingredients (including raw main ingredients and accessory ingredients) into the wok. As a consequence, human intervention is still required during the cooking process, which means the automation degree of the existing cooking machines is yet to be improved.